This collection of essays by well-known scholars forms part of the output generated by two eminent research scenarios – the North Atlantic Missiology Project and the subsequent Currents in World Christianity Project. Both projects have contributed greatly to the missiological discussion and resulted in first-class publications which, like the present volume, are available in Eerdmans's series, Studies in the History of Christian Missions, edited by Robert E. Frykenberg and Brian Stanley. Dana Robert, a missiologist teaching in Boston, has selected her exemplars and materials in such a way that the reader becomes aware of the sheer complexity and variety of modern Protestant mission in Africa and Asia in the first two centuries. She has also made sure that the diverse expectations and constraints generated by the missionary home base are included in the picture and, importantly, that the power of the local context and the initiatives of the indigenous agency in the story of Christianisation are not neglected. The agenda of Converting colonialism is to go beyond some of the popular but stereotypical images of the missionary as agent of colonialism and to introduce fresh ideas as to how the history of Christian mission in the colonial era can be recovered. By acknowledging the pressures that the missionary ideals were under to conform to the logic of the colonial task, yet by at the same time detecting the missionary challenge to the colonial project in the light of the Christian vision of justice and the multi-racial Christian commonwealth – a tension that was to be negotiated in the ‘contextual realities’ among colonisers, missionaries and indigenous Christians – a new and more complex (and contradictory or ambivalent) picture of the missionary process emerges. In fact, the missionary process is not fully understood as long as indigenous Christians are not given the central place they occupy within it. This and other findings of Converting colonialism are very much in line with other pioneering research such as that of the historian Jeff Cox (not among the contributors) whose way of addressing the ambivalence of mission in the colonial era is to speak of missionary ‘double vision’. Is it time then to bid farewell to some of the more creedal statements of the anti-missionary and anti-colonial agenda formulated half a century ago, such as K. M. Panikkar's Asia and western dominance or Frantz Fanon's The wretched of the earth (neither listed in the bibliography)? Not quite, for it is one thing to highlight practical questions of the colonial and missionary context in the comforting thought that the ‘Global South’ has after all appropriated Christianity, and another to ponder the family resemblance between colonial and missionary ideas and, hence, to begin the theological task of decolonising and de-universalising notions such as mission and truth.